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eyeforpharma Marketing and Customer Innovation Europe

By Richard Springham

Sitting with a cold beer reviewing this year’s eyeforpharma Marketing and Customer Innovation Europe, Four Health’s Head of Digital, Rod Folland, summed up the two days perfectly… Not many answers, but a whole lot of questions to explore… and that’s the crucial thing at these type of events. Below we explore 3 key themes from this superb event:

Fail…

As an agency we pride ourselves on delivering the core services to clients with excellence, but we also push clients and partners to think about challenges differently, and this was a key theme throughout the two days in London. There was a consistent encouragement to allow colleagues and partners the permission to fail in the quest to improve not only their own work but to potentially change the industry and move it forward in our unified goal of providing better patient outcomes. At the event we listened intently to inspiring case studies off spin-offs, voice technology and social media disruptions all of which did not have a smooth path to success, but rather failed… learnt…failed again… learnt again and continues to do so. This magnanimous attitude is the only route to true innovation. Are we allowing our teams the permission to fail effectively?

HCPs are human

What a basic assumption! But one that strangely people forget within pharma. It was reaffirming for us at Four Health to hear Pharma colleagues admit this oversight, and call for change in how we communicate with this key audience as a result. Four Health continually push for a more human touch to communications with HCPs, and to mimic the media consumptions in HCPs consumer lives. After all they too gorge on Netflix, listen to hours of Spotify and enjoy the odd meme online! This is not to say we should copy verbatim, but we should at least present content in similar ways to drive uptake, education and behaviour change. Are we doing enough to deliver content to HCPs in ways they consumer their personal media?

Collaborate or deteriorate

Pharma companies are not known for playing nicely together, however it was encouraging to hear the amount of knowledge sharing, collaborations and partnerships taking place in the industry today. Internal teams, partners, tech companies, agencies and even competitors are all coming together to achieve unified goals. Even the largest Pharma companies are recognising and investing heavily in the need for collaboration, agility and innovation to drive the industry forward rather than roll backwards in neutral. This is a source of great optimism to us. As we always as say at Four Health “beautiful things happen when you put the right ingredients together”… and we are all about The Power Of Together. Are we opening our minds enough to the power of collaboration?

We will certainly be asking these questions of ourselves.

We look forward to supporting many more of these events in the future, and continuing to raise questions.

This content was provided by Four Health

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